Back when I was in college I worked at a studio with an Industrial Designer. He gave me studio space, and I did odd jobs around his studio to work off my rent. Unfortunately, this guy was a pretentious jerk, and the situation did not last long, but I will always remember something that he said to me, “I would never take an artist seriously if he didn’t have his own studio…”. Being one of those artists that had no studio of my own, I found it pretty insulting. To be honest, I was well into my third year as a professional artist before I put together a proper studio. Before that, I had an easel, a box of paints, and some brushes in the living room of our house back in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That’s where I completed many of my earlier paintings. Sure, I’d go down to Kendall College, the school I had graduated from, and work out of student studio space sometimes. It was kindof nice working down there because they had a great wood working shop to build my stretchers and frames in. It was also nice to be able to see what other people were working on. Every week or so I would walk around the studio quarters, and look for the most bizarre paintings I could find….and I was never disappointed. Paintings of girls committing suicide, guys masturbating, all kinds of weird stuff. It was also nice to be out of the house, and have some social interaction during the day. Today I work in a studio I’ve built in my unfinished basement. It’s great with tons of space and three individually lit easels for when I have several projects going at once. It has a nice work area for shipping, packaging, building stretchers, etc. I even own all the necessary equipment, nail guns, pneumatic staplers, drills. My studio full of stuff is a necessary thing to run my business now, there is no way I could function without it. But I will always look back with very fond memories of the times I needed nothing more then an easel, a few brushes, and some tubes of paint (and maybe some inspiration). And I guess if I didn’t measure up to what that pretentious Industrial Designer thought an artist should be, well I’m OK with that. Personally I think an artist should be judged solely on the work that he does not where he does it.